Spolsky Stands Firm on Linux on the Desktop

erlando writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution is running an interview with Joel Spolsky (from JoelOnSoftware) in which he responds to this earlier thread here on Slashdot. In short: He defends his position and makes some interesting remarks on Linux and the desktop."

Comments

Show us the Code

[Greyfox]

Joel says he's been programming for 20 years. Is any of his code available for public review? I looked at his web page briefly but nothing jumped out at me.

Narrow viewpoint

[costas]

Joel Spolsky makes good points and his articles are usually excellent reading, regardless if you agree with him or not --I usually do. However, I think he over-generalizes his conclusions based on his own experience --selling consumer-oriented, "shrink-wrap" software. He leaves the entire enterprise software world out of his viewpoint and some of his conclusions don't make sense in that sphere.

For example, I tend to agree that "software doesn't rust". But that holds if your customer is Joe Q Public; it doesn't (usually) hold for enterprises. E.g. his Net Present Value calculation in the article doesn't take into account opportunity cost, i.e. the competitive advantage a company would gain if it upgraded their old F77 program into a faster one, with more mindshare (easier to lure/train IT staff) and more features that would increase productivity and lower costs.

Again, I do usually agree with Joel and read his essays religiously, but I wish he opened his worldview to the rest of the software industry.

bloatware

[tswinzig]

Or, here's an argument that even the youngest slashdotters will understand. The WWW is bloatware. Finding things is impossible because there's so much stuff out there. Think how much hard drive space is wasted on all kinds of web pages that only .00000000001% of the world ever reads. Since the vast majority of people only go to Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN, wouldn't the WWW be better if it only had Yahoo, Ebay, and MSN? It would be much more "optimized."

One difference is I don't run the entire WWW on my computer.

They Stole A Slashdot Interview!

[GeekLife.com]

Hmm...There's nothing preventing any company out there using slashdot comments as interview material for the entire content of their site, right?

It feels weird unknowingly providing content for a for-profit site I don't (often) visit or care about, but I suppose my comments are public-domain once I've posted them here?

I know it doesn't fit in with the copyleft thing, but shouldn't they at least have to ask before using slashdot content for their own means?

Typical "elite" programmer hypocrisy

[Salamander]

Joel thinks that rewriting things is a bad idea because it loses information embedded in the old code (original anti-rewrite essay, search for "Nancy" to find a good example) and then says in the interview:

Half the time when I go into a function to fix a little bug, I figure out a cleaner way to rewrite the whole function

This is the same guy who wrote Yet Another Bug Tracking System while observing that such things were a dime a dozen, and then went on to write Yet Another Content Management System without defining its target market, even as he criticized others for such undirected development. Apparently, Joel's quite comfortable stating commandments for others while living by different rules himself. His articles are unfailingly interesting, but should by no means be accepted as authoritative (as is true for anyone who spends more time on the pundit circuit than actually programming)

Not a moving target?

[drew_kime]

But due to chicken-and-egg problems, running Windows apps is probably nonnegotiable for most people, so WINE is going to have to get a lot better before Linux is a threat to the desktop. I sort of expected with all the effort Corel put into it, it should be there by now, but they seem to be as far as ever from seamlessly running Win apps. (By the way, a lot of people think that the Windows API is too much of a moving target for WINE to catch up. As a Windows developer, let me say, this is rubbish. Almost every Windows app out there is tested on Win 95 to make sure it runs decently on the entire 32 bit Windows product line. If WINE could ever catch up to Win 95, they would be almost completely done. The target hasn't moved anywhere since August, 1995.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when I install, say, Office 2000 on my Win95 machine, doesn't it update many dll's that were part of the original OS installation? That being the case, is it really true to say that new software runs on Win95, or is it more accurate to say that each new app provides an incremental OS upgrade?